Companies like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many others have done dozens of experiments, including creating subscriber-only content, A/B testing pricing, implementing a metered paywall strategy on different content types and user segments, and finally taking advantage of artificial intelligence to put content behind paywalls using propensity scores.

The best paywall strategy - for a media company - is constantly evolving, but our goal is to lay out the fundamentals and the ground rules for implementing one. If you have a question for the ConsCent team while reading the article, you can reach out to us here.

#1 Access Control: Who should see a paywall?

A publisher can put a paywall on content that its editors or creators are sure is subscription worthy. This is 5-10 percent of a platform's content. The content editors need to be sure of what can be put behind metered access, allowing users to read a set number of articles for free without subscribing. This restricts the page view drop on a publisher's platform, as only the loyal users end up seeing the paywall.

The publishers might also want to control content access based on user segments. For example, a higher meter level in the US, which has better-paying behavior for digital news, and a lower meter for India, which is warming up to paying for information. Or, for that matter, a lower meter for anonymous users and a higher meter for a registered user — depending on the requirements. This is best done using segmentation.

#2 Authentication: Manage user identity for better engagement and retention

Setting up a user identity management system is crucial to track user behaviour of your most loyal users, build higher degree of engagement and retention with them, and eventually convert them into subscribers.

This becomes even more critical when you have different subscriptions for different kinds of premium offerings, and want to restrict a subscriber from certain premium sections while granting access to others.

#3  Subscription Management: Optimize subscription cycle for better customer lifetime value

All the way, from showing a paywall, collecting user details, then collecting payments, to sending the invoice to the subscribers, and most of the time, reminding the user to renew the subscription — a sound subscription management system should handle all this with ease. This allows publishers to have all payment-related details of subscribers in one place.

#4 Content Delivery: How to build efficient content distribution for subscription?

Today's users come to your content from various sources. This makes it extremely important for news platforms to ensure that premium content display is proper if you run campaigns — whether through recommendations on a website's story pages or the homepage, which gets between 7-20 percent of the traffic.

Content distribution through social media and newsletters also becomes critical, as publishers need to decide the daily frequency of premium content and, at the same time, resurface archived premium content that might be of interest to a larger audience.

#5 Analytics: Make Data-Driven Decisions with Analytics

With basic analytics in place, like GA or ConsCent In-Depth, publishers can understand content behavior and conversions. Over time use this to understand what kind of content users are willing to pay for. Data-driven newsroom strategies are more than just helping to build the subscription business. Still, they are also critical to understand user behavioral patterns and engagement, even on free stories that can positively impact digital ad revenue over time.

#6 Payment gateway integration: Chose a reliable payment gateway

Even before launching subscriptions, it is essential to have a good payment gateway integrated. With a gateway, publishers can collect money digitally from a user. Some prominent gateways are RazorPay, PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, and Paytm, among many others.

#7  Segmentation: Maximize revenue through user segmented personalization

For content or users, publishers need to segment content types by categories, sections, and sometimes, authors to show a paywall. If a publication is unsure about revenue translation on specific content categories, they can exclude them from metering or put a higher meter to showcase a paywall. The publisher might also want to select audience segments further to create a more optimized revenue translation, for example, a lower meter on apps (as app users have more loyalty) while a higher meter on websites

#8 Marketing: User acquisition with a Comprehensive digital Marketing Strategy

Make sure to expand your reach to find new subscribers. An excellent social and search strategy comes in handy to strengthen the acquisition funnel.

While building a successful subscription business is no rocket science, it is essential to have a good partner in the journey unless the publisher wants to build all the tech in-house. Companies like ConsCent.ai and Piano.io can become good partners in building the subscription management business — but it is equally essential for publishers to have dedicated a couple of people to manage these tools and make the most out of them. If you are serious about building a subscription revenue, about beginning with it, maybe talk to one of the experts.